I live in Vancouver, which is a most excellent city nestled around the Pacific Ocean. Right over there <--- just a little are Japan, China and Russia. We're not too far away from the Bering Sea, which is home to the greatest tv show in the history of television. Our port sees close to 1 million cruise ship travelers at its docks every year. You can walk down the street and hear more languages being spoken at any one time than you knew existed. It's a cool place to live.

You can't have all those different people crammed into one tiny little area of a country and not have some really good food. We have awesome food here. The grocery stores have fresh fish and lobster tanks, just like they did back east when I was a kid. We have produce out the yin-yang. We have sushi; like, real sushi. Sushi like I'd never seen in Denver. We have actual Thai Thai food, real Chinese Chinese food, authentic Japanese Japanese food (which I never knew was any different from Chinese food, honestly. Just call me Wonder Bread), and the best part of all is that we have real Indian Indian food. We also have the world's best cream puffs. No, I'm not exaggerating.

You'd think with all of this amazing, diverse, intense cuisine, someone could figure out how to make a decent pot of green chili. You'd think someone would have HEARD of a decent pot of green chili.

Lies.

I've seen green chili in jars in the Ethnic Foods aisle at the grocery store (and if you don't think we have the best ethnic food aisles in the whole wide world, you'd be sadly mistaken). It's really green. Kermit green. Jello green. It doesn't have any pork in it. It doesn't appear to have any chili in it. I am too afraid of it to buy it. We've gone out for "mexican" here, and you would never know that Mexico is somewhere you could actually walk to from here, given the right shoes and spare time. Mexico seems as remote a country as Zimbabwe, and the cuisine about as accessible as bottled water from Mars.

What does this have to do with Denver? Oh, nothing, except that Denver has some pretty kick ass green chili. It's not The Frontier, mind you, but it really doesn't suck at all. The diner I worked at for far too many years has this green chili recipe that was given to them by the mother of one of the first cooks there. That mother lives IN MEXICO. And has forever. It's her family recipe, and it's better than chocolate dipped sex.

I went home for 3 days and managed to make every meal I ate include a large amount of green chili. There were hash browns drowned in green chili, humongous burritos and enchiladas smothered in it, and huevos rancheros made with ohmygodhomemade refried beans and, you guessed it, green chili. With monstrous chunks of pork in it. I ate nothing that didn't come smothered.

I can't even begin to describe to you how bad I probably still smell, and those Pepto pills I had to buy on my way to the airport are making for a great paper-weight right now. And I am totally going through withdrawls, because god know how long it will be before I get to go back and eat some decent Mexican food.